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8 results for 'witchcraft'

Mud and wetted boots from chasing her through the moors, he finally caught up with her, though exhausted, she still put up a fight.

Breathless screams for help did her no good, not out here, where it was too barren, too cold for any human to survive for long, where the heavy fog blanketed the sedge grass and it wilted under its dampness.

Her clothes were tattered, expected, her life lived in the woods at the edge of the moors would be a poor one, but yet she was still pretty. He observed her cream complexion beneath... (more)

...She was dragged from her hut by a mob, stripped naked and tortured with white hot iron bars before being incinerated on top of a pile of petrol soaked tyres. This atrocity took place the village of Paiala in the highlands to the north-west of Port Moresby, the capital.

Belief in witchcraft and black magic is widespread in Papua New Guinea, but please do not assume that this was the work of primitive people. There are indeed many stone-age like communities in the country but Paiala is not one of them. The barbarism here, if anything, resembled the kind of lynchings once... (more)

... In Salem one can enjoy the Haunted Happenings; in Lancashire it’s possible to ride every Witch Way. Both places have recreated the trials of the accused for visitors, interesting, educational and diverting.

It’s all past; it’s all innocent fun. There are places, though, where witchcraft is neither new age nor diversion. There are places where accusations of malevolent magic can rise with shocking suddenness, often with fatal consequences. There are places where our past is their present.

In Ghana in West Africa up to a thousand women, most of them elderly, have been ... (more)

This has always seemed like a magical time of year to me, Midsummer, the Solstice, Litha, whatever one wishes to call it; it has ever since I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eight years old. The Sun is now in the sign of Cancer, my birth sign, the sign of the Moon. The magical forces are now at the height, and Robin Goodfellow puts a girdle round the Earth!

Midsummer Eve itself, St John's Eve, is a major holiday for witches and all who love them, all who love the old power and the ancient ways. Traditionally it was a fire and water festival, a... (more)

The story is just so bizarre, even more bizarre than the sort of thing that normally comes out of Zimbabwe. For one thing why the sperm was taken in such circumstances has still to be established, though it is thought that it is used in ‘juju’, traditional witchcraft practices designed to bring good fortune. For another it’s unclear why force is used, in that men are not usually noted for their reluctance to donate sperm freely, though possibly compulsion adds, ahem, to the potency.

According to Watch Ruparanganda, a sociologist at the University ... (more)

...to jump to conclusions. It’s just as well they stayed away from my party then, or various erroneous conclusions might have been leapt at! Actually, I shouldn’t really make fun of this, though the earnestness really invites humour. It’s a measure of the growing importance of witchcraft that officers are being introduced to terms like “merry meet” and “wickening”; to festivals such as Imbolic, Lughnasadh and Samahin.

It’s all delightfully educational; I’m just not sure what it has to do with policing. “Pagans”, we are told, “have no religious dietary ... (more)

...where to go and what precautions to take. It’s when I said that I was going to go to Kigali, the capital of adjacent Rwanda, that I was most surprised: I should not go, I was told with genuine concern, there are too many witches there.I've since learned how powerful the African belief in witchcraft is, witchcraft in general and magic in particular, and these come not in any benign neo-pagan sense but in the darkest forms imaginable. It’s particularly dark in the murder of albino people, whose body parts are used in muti or medicine magic, a trend that seems to be most marked in East... (more)